>>Call it macro idiosyncrasy
>
>Call it ease of debugging. You can put a breakpoint after the TRY and see whether loGrid is the object you thought it would be.
>
>I'd actually rather
>
>loGrid=getPem(this.parent, "lcGridName")
>
>because that doesn't run the expression evaluator at all (as eval() must do), it queries the object directly.

Right you are. I just was unable to remember getpem syntax before, but now I think I will.